title: Characterizing venous vasculatures of hepatocellular carcinoma using a multi-breath-hold two-dimensional susceptibility weighted imaging.
abstract: The aim of our study is to characterize the venous vasculatures of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) using a multi-breath-hold two-dimensional (2D) susceptibility weighted imaging (SWI) in comparison with conventional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) sequences. Twenty-nine patients with pathologically confirmed HCC underwent MR examination at a 3.0 T scanner. The number of venous vascularity in or around the lesion was counted and the image quality was subjectively evaluated by two experienced radiologists independently based on four image sets: 1) SWI, 2) T1-weighted sequence, 3) T2-weighted sequence, and 4) T1-weighted dynamic contrast-enhanced (DCE) sequence. Of the 29 patients, a total of 33 liver lesions were detected by both SWI and conventional MR sequences. In the evaluation of the conspicuity of venous vascularity, a mean of 10.7 tumor venous vessels per mass was detected by the SWI and 3.9 tumor vasculatures were detected by T1-weighted DCE (P<0.0001), while none was detected by T1-, T2-weighted sequences. The Pearson correlation coefficients between the lesion sizes and the number of tumor vasculatures detected by T1-weighted DCE was 0.708 (P<0.001), and 0.883 by SWI (P<0.001). Our data suggest that SWI appears to be a more sensitive tool compared to T1-weighted DCE sequence to characterize venous vasculature in liver lesions.
authors.affiliation: Department of Radiology, Yueyang Hospital of Integrated Traditional Chinese & Western Medicine, Shanghai University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Shanghai, China.
authors.forename: Shi-Xin
authors.initials: SX
authors.lastname: Chang
authors.forename: Guan-Wu
authors.initials: GW
authors.lastname: Li
authors.forename: Yao
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Chen
authors.forename: Hong
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Bao
authors.forename: Lei
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Zhou
authors.forename: Jun
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Yuan
authors.forename: Dong-Mei
authors.initials: DM
authors.lastname: Wu
authors.forename: Yong-Ming
authors.initials: YM
authors.lastname: Dai
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D062485:Breath Holding; D006528:Carcinoma, Hepatocellular / Q000098:blood supply* / Q000473:pathology; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008113:Liver Neoplasms / Q000098:blood supply* / Q000473:pathology; D018810:Magnetic Resonance Angiography / Q000379:methods*; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D012189:Retrospective Studies; D059629:Signal-To-Noise Ratio; D047368:Tumor Burden